In short, nobody is going to advise you to create a poor UX, on purpose, in light of Google’s algorithms and human quality raters who are showing an obvious interest in this stuff. Google is rating mobile sites on what it classes is frustrating UX – although on certain levels what Google classes as ‘UX’ might be quite far apart from what a UX professional is familiar with in the same ways as Google’s mobile rating tools differ from, for instance, W3c Mobile testing tools.

QUOTE: “The preferred domain is the one that you would liked used to index your site’s pages (sometimes this is referred to as the canonical domain). Links may point to your site using both the www and non-www versions of the URL (for instance, http://www.example.com and http://example.com). The preferred domain is the version that you want used for your site in the search results.” Google, 2018

The biggest advantage any one provider has over another is experience and resource. The knowledge of what doesn’t work and what will hurt your site is often more valuable than knowing what will give you a short-lived boost. Getting to the top of Google is a relatively simple process. One that is constantly in change. Professional SEO is more a collection of skills, methods and techniques. It is more a way of doing things, than a one-size-fits-all magic trick.
Google Ads (formerly Google Adwords) is the search provider most commonly used for this strategy. With this tactic, brands conduct keyword research and create campaigns that target the best keywords for their industry, products, or services. When users search for those keywords, they see the custom ads at the top or bottom of SERPs. The brand is charged each time a user clicks on the ad.
QUOTE: “Duplicated content is often not manipulative and is commonplace on many websites and often free from malicious intent. Copied content can often be penalised algorithmically or manually. Duplicate content is not penalised, but this is often not an optimal set-up for pages, either. Be VERY careful ‘spinning’ ‘copied’ text to make it unique!” Shaun Anderson, Hobo, 2018
The SEO tools in this roundup provide tremendous digital marketing value for businesses, but it's important not to forget that we're living in Google's world under Google's constantly evolving rules. Oh and don't forget to check the tracking data on Bing now and again, either. Google's the king with over 90 percent of worldwide internet search, according to StatCounter, but the latest ComScore numbers have Bing market share sitting at 23 percent. Navigable news and more useful results pages make Bing a viable choice in the search space as well.
Naturally, business owners want to rank for lots of keywords in organic listings with their website. The challenge for webmasters and SEO is that Google doesn’t want business owners to rank for lots of keywords using autogenerated content especially when that produces A LOT of pages on a website using (for instance) a list of keyword variations page-to-page.
QUOTE: ‘To make our results more useful, we’ve begun experiments to make our index mobile-first. Although our search index will continue to be a single index of websites and apps, our algorithms will eventually primarily use the mobile version of a site’s content to rank pages from that site, to understand structured data, and to show snippets from those pages in our results. Of course, while our index will be built from mobile documents, we’re going to continue to build a great search experience for all users, whether they come from mobile or desktop devices.
Consider the age of your business. If you just opened your business and launched your website, it’s going to take time to develop your SEO and begin to appear organically in the search. While that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t put together an SEO strategy, it does mean that you could benefit from an SEM strategy until you build your SEO. SEM is an effective way to drive traffic while building organic SEO.
QUOTE: “Starting April 21 (2015), we will be expanding our use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact in our search results. Consequently, users will find it easier to get relevant, high-quality search results that are optimized for their devices”. GOOGLE
I’ve got by, by thinking external links to other sites should probably be on single pages deeper in your site architecture, with the pages receiving all your Google Juice once it’s been “soaked up” by the higher pages in your site structure (the home page, your category pages). This tactic is old school but I still follow it. I don’t need to think you need to worry about that, too much, in 2019.
Tablet - We consider tablets as devices in their own class, so when we speak of mobile devices, we generally do not include tablets in the definition. Tablets tend to have larger screens, which means that, unless you offer tablet-optimized content, you can assume that users expect to see your site as it would look on a desktop browser rather than on a smartphone browser.
Google is all about ‘user experience’ and ‘visitor satisfaction’ in 2019 so it’s worth remembering that usability studies have shown that a good page title length is about seven or eight words long and fewer than 64 total characters. Longer titles are less scan-able in bookmark lists, and might not display correctly in many browsers (and of course probably will be truncated in SERPs).

Another illicit practice is to place "doorway" pages loaded with keywords on the client's site somewhere. The SEO promises this will make the page more relevant for more queries. This is inherently false since individual pages are rarely relevant for a wide range of keywords. More insidious, however, is that these doorway pages often contain hidden links to the SEO's other clients as well. Such doorway pages drain away the link popularity of a site and route it to the SEO and its other clients, which may include sites with unsavory or illegal content.

It is important you spread all that real ‘PageRank’ – or link equity – to your sales keyword / phrase rich sales pages, and as much remains to the rest of the site pages, so Google does not ‘demote’ pages into oblivion – or ‘supplemental results’ as we old timers knew them back in the day. Again – this is slightly old school – but it gets me by, even today.

AWR Cloud, our third Editors' Choice, is rated slightly lower than Moz Pro and SpyFu as an all-in-one SEO platform. However, AWR Cloud leads the pack in ongoing position monitoring and proactive search rank tracking on top of solid overall functionality. On the ad hoc keyword research front, the KWFinder.com tool excels. DeepCrawl's laser focus on comprehensive domain scanning is unmatched for site crawling, while Ahrefs and Majetic can duke it out for the best internet-wide crawling index. When it comes to backlinks tracking, LinkResearchTools and Majestic are the top choices. SEMrush and Searchmetrics do a bit of everything.

Try and get links within page text pointing to your site with relevant, or at least, natural looking, keywords in the text link – not, for instance, in blogrolls or site-wide links. Try to ensure the links are not obviously “machine generated” e.g. site-wide links on forums or directories. Get links from pages, that in turn, have a lot of links to them, and you will soon see benefits.

Redirecting is the act of sending a user to a different URL than the one initially requested. There are many good reasons to redirect from one URL to another, for example, when a website moves to a new address. However, some redirects are designed to deceive search engines and users. These are a very poor user experience, and users may feel tricked or confused. We will call these “sneaky redirects.” Sneaky redirects are deceptive and should be rated Lowest.

I prefer simple SEO techniques and ones that can be measured in some way. I have never just wanted to rank for competitive terms; I have always wanted to understand at least some of the reasons why a page ranked for these key phrases. I try to create a good user experience for humans AND search engines. If you make high-quality text content relevant and suitable for both these audiences, you’ll more than likely find success in organic listings and you might not ever need to get into the technical side of things, like redirects and search engine friendly URLs.

I had the same issue. I invested time to go to the website of each of these tools, had to read through the specs of what they offer in their free account etc etc. Some of them did not even allow you to use one single feature until you gave them details for a credit card (even thouhg they wouldn’t charge it for 10-15 days or so). I did not enjoy this approch at all. Free is free. “Free version” should only talk about what you can do in the free version. Same goes for trial version.

Google is looking for a “website that is well cared for and maintained” so you need to keep content management systems updated, check for broken image links and HTML links. If you create a frustrating user experience through sloppy website maintenance – expect that to be reflected in some way with a lower quality rating. Google Panda October 2014 went for e-commerce pages that were optimised ‘the old way’ and are now classed as ‘thin content’.
Think about how Google can algorithmically and manually determine the commercial intent of your website – think about the signals that differentiate a real small business website from a website created JUST to send visitors to another website with affiliate links, on every page, for instance; or adverts on your site, above the fold, etc, can be a clear indicator of a webmaster’s particular commercial intent – hence why Google has a Top Heavy Algorithm.
But essentially the idea there is that this is a good representative of the the content from your website and that’s all that we would show to users on the other hand if someone is specifically looking for let’s say dental bridges in Dublin then we’d be able to show the appropriate clinic that you have on your website that matches that a little bit better so we’d know dental bridges is something that you have a lot on your website and Dublin is something that’s unique to this specific page so we’d be able to pull that out and to show that to the user like that so from a pure content duplication point of view that’s not really something I totally worry about.
Google decides which pages on your site are important or most relevant. You can help Google by linking to your important pages and ensuring at least one page is well optimised amongst the rest of your pages for your desired key phrase. Always remember Google does not want to rank ‘thin’ pages in results – any page you want to rank – should have all the things Google is looking for. That’s a lot these days!

Mike Levin is the Senior SEO Director at Ziff Davis, PCMag's parent company. His career goes back 25 years to the halls of Commodore Computers, as an original Amiga fanboy to be beamed up by the mothership just as it imploded. Over his past 10 years in NYC, Mike's highlights have included leading the Apple Store, Kraft and JCPenney SEO accounts whi... See Full Bio

For the purposes of our testing, we standardized keyword queries across the five tools. To test the primary ad hoc keyword search capability with each tool, we ran queries on an identical set of keywords. From there we tested not only the kinds of data and metrics the tool gave, but how it handled keyword management and organization, and what kind of optimization recommendations and suggestions the tool provided.
The world is mobile today. Most people are searching on Google using a mobile device. The desktop version of a site might be difficult to view and use on a mobile device. As a result, having a mobile ready site is critical to your online presence. In fact, starting in late 2016, Google has begun experiments to primarily use the mobile version of a site's content42 for ranking, parsing structured data, and generating snippets.

QUOTE: “So there’s three things that you really want to do well if you want to be the world’s best search engine you want to crawl the web comprehensively and deeply you want to index those pages and then you want to rank or serve those pages and return the most relevant ones first….. we basically take PageRank as the primary determinant and the more PageRank you have that is the more people who link to you and the more reputable those people are the more likely it is we’re going to discover your page…. we use page rank as well as over 200 other factors in our rankings to try to say okay maybe this document is really authoritative it has a lot of reputation because it has a lot of PageRank … and that’s kind of the secret sauce trying to figure out a way to combine those 200 different ranking signals in order to find the most relevant document.” Matt Cutts, Google

QUOTE: “So sites that don’t have much content “above-the-fold” can be affected by this change. If you click on a website and the part of the website you see first either doesn’t have a lot of visible content above-the-fold or dedicates a large fraction of the site’s initial screen real estate to ads, that’s not a very good user experience.” Google 2012
It is important you spread all that real ‘PageRank’ – or link equity – to your sales keyword / phrase rich sales pages, and as much remains to the rest of the site pages, so Google does not ‘demote’ pages into oblivion – or ‘supplemental results’ as we old timers knew them back in the day. Again – this is slightly old school – but it gets me by, even today.
An SEO audit should not be rushed. It simply takes time to uncover root causes of the issues affecting your online health. Depending on the size of your site, a proper audit can take anywhere from 2-6 weeks to complete. Due diligence is required when making major changes to any website, and an SEO specialist must conduct a thorough investigation to make accurate, impactful recommendations.